Be a Budget Foodie

Straight from a library shelf to your kitchen! You will love recipes like chicken cacciatore with prunes or a molded apple blue cheese salad. I am sure your mouth is watering from all of these wonderful foods. As a child of the 1960s, I can say that no fancy meal would be complete without a jello mold with fruit cocktail.

I know that future generations might need to stroll down a gastronomic memory lane, but does it have to be this cookbook? It’s a bit embarrassing. For those that love the truly awful in cooking, may I direct your attention to Retro Recipe or James Lilek’s Gallery of Regrettable Food. You won’t be disappointed, but you will feel a bit nauseated.

I was wondering that too. Looks like bamboo shoots and radishes 0.O I love Jell-O with fruit, and I kind of dig those fancy tiered molds – but Jell-O and savory? No thanks.

It’s kind of interesting to see how these “budget” recipes reflect the markets in the 1960s. There’s stuff that makes sense and would still be low-cost today – gelatin, chicken, apples – but then that casserole that calls for ham, veal, and ground beef! Yeah, not so budget friendly.

This looks similar to a “recipe collection” my mom got for me as a joke off of E-Bay, called “American Favorites” or something like that. Lots of horrible Jell-O salads, my favorite being one that contains corned beef! Yikes.

At first I read “molded apples” as is apples overgrown with fungi, and was scared-impressed. How does one carefully mold one’s apples so that only benevolent cheese molds grow on them instead of the more common unhealthy green fuzz?
But then I realized, it was aspic all along!
Actually, jelly is a lot of fun! I guess I’m just at that age when I barely remember loving days of grandmother’s cooking, but I want to learn how to make aspic food that still is attractive today!